Antique 1939-41 Bradshaw Crandell Pin Up 🚬 World of Sunshine Cigarette Advertising Lithograph Art Print

What Was the World of Sunshine? 🎨 Antique 1939-41 Bradshaw Crandell Pin-Up Cigarette Advertising Lithograph

Size: 10 3/4" x 14" ~ NOS Clean, bright example with excellent display presence. Very minor edge wear from long-term storage may be present, visible only upon close inspection.

🎨 The Print Itself

"A World of Sunshine" is a Gerlach-Barklow calendar advertising print, single-sided on heavy paper, the verso blank. A blonde in a white ruffled dress stands in front of an open red car, an armful of yellow and white daisies in one arm, her other hand resting on a wide white hat with a blue-violet bow set on the car door. Four cigarette packs float beside her - Camel, Lucky Strike, Old Gold and Chesterfield, each shown open with cigarettes standing out. "A WORLD OF SUNSHINE" runs across the bottom center, Bradshaw Crandell's own signature sits in the plate at lower left, and the imprint at lower right reads "(c) THE GERLACH BARKLOW CO / JOLIET, ILL." - no year follows the copyright mark on this sheet.

🚬 Four Brands on a Calendar Picture

The same picture exists without any cigarette packs at all - just the woman, the car, the daisies and the hat. That tells the real story here: Gerlach-Barklow sold its calendar art to businesses by the case, for them to hand out to their own customers, and this stock picture was printed with four cigarette packs added, the kind of giveaway a tobacco shop or jobber handed across the counter. This exact four-pack sheet turns up elsewhere still attached to a full calendar pad - one dated January 1939, another dated January 1941 - so the print itself belongs to a two-year run rather than one single year. The green Lucky Strike pack narrows it a little further: Lucky Strike didn't switch that pack from green to white until 1942 ("Lucky Strike Green has gone to war"), so this art was printed before then. Old Gold, the yellow pack reading "..the treasure of them all," had been on shelves since P. Lorillard introduced it in 1926.

✍️ Bradshaw Crandell

Crandell earned the nickname "the artist of the stars" for a long run of Hollywood portrait covers, but he started out far from Hollywood - born in Glens Falls, New York in 1896, his first professional work was a 1921 hair-net ad for F. W. Woolworth, followed that same year by his first magazine cover for Judge. He opened his own studio in 1925 and dropped "John" from his professional name around 1935. He took over Cosmopolitan's cover art from Harrison Fisher and painted it for twelve years running through the thirties and forties, along the way painting real stars of the day - Carole Lombard, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Veronica Lake and Lana Turner among them. He died in Madison, Connecticut in 1966, and was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2006.

🏭 Gerlach-Barklow, Joliet, Illinois

Theodore R. Gerlach, Edward J. Barklow and K. H. Gerlach organized the company in 1907 and built its Joliet factory that same year. By 1919 a trade journal was calling it the largest business in the world devoted purely to art calendars, and by the 1950s it employed more than 1,500 people, sponsored its own sports teams, and threw an annual employee picnic. The plant closed in 1971. Local legend in Joliet has it that the presses ran through the night in the run-up to calendar season, that fresh ink was a fixture of the neighborhood smell for blocks around, and that the pressroom crew got a first look at each new season's featured illustration before the salesmen did, because the proof sheets came off the stone first.